As part of writing a new mail client I'm wondering about how to change my email-life, and how other people process/handle their incoming email.

I sort my incoming email into folders at delivery-time using procmail. Mail is generally filtered into mailboxes on the basis of the company that sent it, the person that sent it, or the machine which generated it.

Because I manage a lot of machines personally I've split things up so that I have a folder per host. So on a morning I might have unread mail in the following folders:

Generally speaking I don't need to read the per-machine messages. I'll keep the most recent 100 for reference, but only need to look if something seems "off" on a machine. But if I don't look I'd not see the node upgrade notice, so find that I do read them after all.

This suggest to me that email isn't the right way to handle this kind of thing. Instead I should use a notification system - at work we have a central service called MauveAlert (yes, Red Dwarf reference). Mauve receives "alerts" of various kinds, via UDP. The alerts are then fanned out to appropriate people via XMPP, Email, or SMSs.

I have a similarly-inspired system I use on my Debian Administration cluster. A (node) service runs non-stop collecting UDP messages and showing them on a dashboard. I look at it throughout the day to see when slaughter runs, etc.

Anyway in conslusion I get a lot of mail. Some of it is related to random projects, and all ends up in the steve.org.uk/ mailbox, some of it relates to machines, and gets filed away, and I have regular conversions with folk so I have a .people.kirsi/ folder which receives a lot of attention, for example.

Give me a few days and I'll stop writing about Lumail, but tomorrow I intend to make the first stable source & binary release. From that point onwards you'll not need to track the github repository to getu pdates.

The first binary release of the mail-client is obviously something of a big deal. I've been using the client daily for the past week or so, as a read-only mail-viewer. But now that the compose() and reply() primitives are present it is usable "for real". Having real scripting present is also allowing me to do interesting things, which are kinda/sorta demonstrated on the examples page.

Now its a case of fixing up a couple of display-related glitches, and implementing things that are both missing and desirable. Happily the list of missing things is actually surprisingly small.

I think the biggest outstanding issue is that the defaults are Steve-friendly, for example the colour-setup should probably be configurable.

Beyond the personal-defaults I think the next biggest issue is the lack of threading support. Messages are displayed in oldest->newest order. Always.

The other omission is that it is impossible to tag-things, in the mutt-sense, so you can't reply to two messages at once. That's a design decision I might have to revisit. The balance of course is that you can open multiple folders at once, and that rocks!

Slaughter is my sysadmin utility which pulls policies/recipies from a central location and applies them to the local host.

Slaughter has a bunch of different transports, which are the means by which policies and files are transferred from the remote "central host" to the local machine. Since git is supported I've now switched my policies to be fetched from the master github repository.

This means:

All my servers need git installed. Which was already the case.

I can run one less service on my main box.

We now have a contest: Is my box more reliable than github?

In other news I've fettled with lumail a bit this week, but I'm basically doing nothing until I've pondered my way out of the hole I've dug myself into.

Like mutt lumail has the notion of "limiting" the display of things:

Show all maildirs.

Show all maildirs with new mail in them.

Show all maildirs that match a pattern.

Show all messages in the currently selected folder(s)

More than one folder may be selected :)

Shall all unread messages in the currently selected folder(s).

Unfortunately the latter has caused an annoying, and anticipated, failure case. If you open a folder and cause it to only show unread messages all looks good. Until you read a message. At which point it is no longer allowed to be displayed, so it disappears. Since you were reading a message the next one is opened instead. WHich then becomes marked as read, and no longer should be displayed, because we've said "show me new/unread-only messages please".

The net result is if you show only unread messages and make the mistake of reading one .. you quickly cycle through reading all of them, and are left with an empty display. As each message in turn is opened, read, and marked as non-new.

There are solutions, one of which I documented on the issue. But this has a bad side-effect that message navigation is suddenly complicated in ways that are annoying.

For the moment I'm mulling the problem over and I will only make trivial cleanup changes until I've got my head back in the game and a good solution that won't cause me more pain.

I've recently started staging upgrades from Squeeze to Wheezy. One unpleasant surprise was that the mutt-patched package available to Debian doesn't contain the "sidebar-new-only" patch.

This means I need to maintain it myself again, which I'd rather avoid. Over time I've been slowly moving to standard Debian systems, trying to not carry too many local perversions around.

Unfortunately if you've kept all your mail since 1994 you have many mailboxes. having mutt-patched available at all, with the sidebar patch, is a great timesaver. But I don't want to see mailboxes I'm never going to touch; just mailboxes with new mail in them.

Also I find the idea of having to explicitly define mailboxes a pain. Just run inotify on ~/Maildir and discover the damn things yourself. Please computer, compute!

If you divide up "mail client" into distinct steps it doesn't seem so hard:

Show a list of folders: all, new-mail-containing only.

Viewing a list of mail-messages: all in folder, or folders.

Compose a new mail.

Reply to a mail.

Obviously there is more to it than that. Sending mail? exec( sendmail ). Filtering mail? procmail/sieve/etc. Editing mail? exec(vim).

I'm sure if I were to start a core of a program, suitable for myself, would be simple enough. Maybe with lua, maybe with javascript, but with a real language at the core.

Anyway I've thought this before, and working with quilt and some ropy patches has always seemed like the way to go. Maybe it still is, but I can dream.

(PS. Sup + Notmuch both crash on my archives. I do not wish to examine them further. Still some interesting ideas. It should be possible to say "maildirs are tags; view "~/Maildir/.livejournal.2003" and~/Maildir/.livejournal.2007 at the same time. Why just a single directory in the "index-view? So 1994.)